Assange Keeps Warning Of A.I. Censorship, And It's Time We Started Listening
Content adapted from this Zerohedge.com article : Source
by Tyler Durden
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Throughout the near entirety of human history, a population's understanding of what's going on in the world has been controlled by those in power. The men in charge controlled what the people were told about rival populations, the history of their tribe and its leadership, etc. When the written word was invented, men in charge dictated what books were permitted to be written and circulated, what ideas were allowed, what narratives the public would be granted access to.
This continued straight on into modern times. Where power is not overtly totalitarian, wealthy elites have bought up all media, first in print, then radio, then television, and used it to advance narratives that are favorable to their interests. Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.
This newly democratized narrative-generating power of the masses gave those in power an immense fright, and they've been working to restore the old order of power controlling information ever since. And the editor-in-chief of the aforementioned leak publishing outlet, WikiLeaks, has been repeatedly trying to warn us about this coming development.
pic.twitter.com/nqm7QIMHGA
— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) January 17, 2018
In a statement that was recently read during the "Organising Resistance to Internet Censorship" webinar, sponsored by the World Socialist Web Site, Assange warned of how "digital super states" like Facebook and Google have been working to "re-establish discourse control", giving authority over how ideas and information are shared back to those in power.
Assange went on to say that the** manipulative attempts of world power structures to regain control of discourse in the information age has been "operating at a scale, speed, and increasingly at a subtlety, that appears likely to eclipse human counter-measures."**
What this means is that using increasingly more advanced forms of artificial intelligence, power structures are becoming more and more capable of controlling the ideas and information that people are able to access and share with one another, hide information which goes against the interests of those power structures and elevate narratives which support those interests, all of course while maintaining the illusion of freedom and lively debate. !
https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/20180121_assange2.jpg
This is not the first time that Assange has cautioned about these developments. In an appearance via video link at musician and activist M.I.A.'s Meltdown Festival last June, the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief expounded in far more detail about his thoughts on the potential for artificial intelligence to be used for controlling online information and discourse in a way human intelligence can't hope to keep up with.
Pointing out how AI can already outmaneuver even the greatest chess players in the world, he describes how programs which can operate with exponentially more tactical intelligence than the human intellect can manipulate the field of available information so effectively and subtly that people won't even know they are being manipulated. People will be living in a world that they think they understand and know about, but they'll unknowingly be viewing only establishment-approved information.
"When you have AI programs harvesting all the search queries and YouTube videos someone uploads it starts to lay out perceptual influence campaigns, twenty to thirty moves ahead," Assange said.
"This starts to become totally beneath the level of human perception."
**To be clear, this is already happening. Due to a recent shift in Google's "evaluation methods", traffic to left-leaning and anti-establishment websites has plummeted, **with sites like WikiLeaks, Alternet, Counterpunch, Global Research, Consortium News, Truthout, and WSWS losing up to 70 percent of the views they were getting prior to the changes. Powerful billionaire oligarchs Pierre Omidyar and George Soros are openly financing the development of "an automated fact-checking system" (AI) to hide "fake news" from the public.
Whenever they are accused of censoring anti-establishment narratives, these "digital super states" have been consistently denying participating in censorship themselves and instead blaming the algorithm for the information's disappearance from public view. But what does that mean, exactly?
It means "It wasn't me censoring you! It was the AI!" Which is the exact threat that Assange is pointing to here.
To make matters even worse, there's no way to know the exact extent to which this is going on, because we know that we can absolutely count on the digital super states in question to lie about it. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked point-blank if Twitter was obstructing the #DNCLeaks from trending, a hashtag people were using to build awareness of the DNC emails which had just been published by WikiLeaks, and Dorsey flatly denied it. > Hmm. True or not? @jack, did Twitter block #DNCLeaks from trending?
— Tré Goins-Phillips ☃️ (@tregp) July 23, 2016
More than a year later, we learned from a prepared testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism by Twitter's acting general counsel Sean J. Edgett that this was completely false and Twitter had indeed been doing exactly that to protect the interests of US political structures by sheltering the public from information allegedly gathered by Russian hackers.
"With respect to #DNCLeak, approximately 23,000 users posted around 140,000 unique Tweets with that hashtag in the relevant period," Edgett said._ "Of those Tweets, roughly 2% were from Russian-linked accounts. As noted above, our automated systems at the time detected, labeled, and hid just under half (48%) of all the original Tweets with #DNCLeak."_
@RudyTakala false
— jack (@jack) July 23, 2016
So this is happening already. There's no way to know exactly to what extent at this point because these powerful corporations are hiding behind so much dishonesty and opacity, but it is happening without question.
Imagine going back to a world like the Middle Ages where you only knew the things your king wanted you to know, except you could still watch innocuous kitten videos on Youtube.
That appears to be where we may be headed, and if that happens the possibility of any populist movement arising to hold power to account may be effectively locked out from the realm of possibility forever.
To claim that these powerful new media corporations are just private companies practicing their freedom to determine what happens on their property is to bury your head in the sand and ignore the extent to which these digital super states are already inextricably interwoven with existing power structures.
In a corporatist system of government, which America unquestionably has, corporate censorship is government censorship, of an even more pernicious strain than if Jeff Sessions were touring the country burning books. The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more adept these power structures will become at manipulating us. Time to start paying very close attention to this.
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The disinformation campaign and the war on "fake news' has really stepped up lately.
Years ago we could just choose not to watch TV, now the BS is infecting the whole internet.
I don't know what the answer is other than to challenge the morality and the humanity of the AI telling us BS about anything.
If an entity is artificial then it's not human and inhumane by default, I just don't pay any credence to inhumane or immoral perspectives.
The robots/AI can go fuck themselves in their fake imagined worlds. If they won't present anything that verifies them as human then they can just fuck off.
Soros should have been dead long ago too, why does he feel the need to spread his satanic curse on on humanity when he'll probably die soon and never see any benefit from his selfish meddling.
What a weight to have on your soul, being someone who consciously chose to undermine his own species. I hope he comes back as a cockroach so I can step on him.
the elite kids all behave like 'the soros'
And they as a whole spread that curse. It's not just the scared little Soros. It's the scared elite kids, who are now affraid that they no longer get our money
If they would gave given us something for out money in the first place this might have been different, but they all are too greedy.
They tought they screwed us, now they see that they screwed themselves.
We just need to stay unscrewed and not play 'their game'.
For them it is a game to get our money
For us it is not a game, we just live.. With or without the elite.
We don't need the elite, the elite however cannot live without us.
We stand much stronger. we know that we can't trust the elite. They know they can trust us.
When we say enough is enough, then they know that the game is over.
And now they have nowhere to go.
The rats will leave this sinking spaceship called earth.
And we will gain an ocean of freedom to swim in.
@zer0hedge...bro What will happen as we are not the most intelligent on Earth? Several options: Live like sewer rats, live in a zoo, or live in a nature preserve. Some believe Earth is controlled by aliens that limit their interference, so we could already be in a nature preserve.There is a good deal of difference between chess (which takes place on a 8 by 8 grid with limited pieces and limited rules of engagement all of which can be easily mapped and predicted) and life.The more AI is involved in predicting and manipulating human activity the more overtly bizarre those prognostications and attempts to control will become.The fact that Assange (& Chomsky, for that matter) reveal important truths does not change the fact they are agents of the matrix..No one would dispute the stated theme of the narrative above: the Net can open minds if left unfettered...thank you for sharing with us ....
True AI? Thinking AI? No such thing. It's just a program, an algorithm developed by man. A computer no matter how powerful it is, can't be self aware or self thinking because it is not interfaced to consciousness. Intelligence level does not give birth to consciousness. Brains are computers too, however they don't think on their own, nor they operate on their own and they are not aware nor made of "aware" matter. Brains require consciousness to operate them. And these so called emotional manipulations done by Facebook and other companies only work on people who are not yet awake. Sadly, they are the majority. And unfortunately they are successful. We need to be conscious to stop it. For this, we should write more about this subject and talk more. Thank you very much for informing us and for warning us. @zer0hedge
I hope you will see the comment. I could not post the comment early due to the bandwidth problem.
Not until humanity gained widespread access to the internet has our species had the ability to freely and easily share ideas and information on a large scale without regulation by the iron-fisted grip of power. This newfound ability arguably had a direct impact on the election for the most powerful elected office in the most powerful government in the world in 2016, as a leak publishing outlet combined with alternative and social media enabled ordinary Americans to tell one another their own stories about what they thought was going on in their country.
Why are you simply cutting and pasting your comment from the above story?
More confusing to me, why is the author upvoting it?
the term "freedom"is not what it used to be, and is loosing more and more of its meaning. Everything is theese days associated with some form of government, either one way or another.
The "powerfull" will always control informationflow as much as possible.
Even if there's a positive goal in there somewhere, at what point is an article or entire site ignored? When its 10% inaccurate? 20%? What about the other 80% or 90%? I read many inaccurate sources to glean facts not available elsewhere.
Censorship has always taken place and always will. Unfortunately the government and the powers that be, seem to think we cannot make such choices for ourselves. That is why this site is just so very important. Both in that it is decentralized, and this site is also a way for people to make money.
I am always with those who write a very good article, you are one of my favorite among them. I always pay close attention to your articles. I'll try to stay with you as long as I work on this steemit site. And I hope that you too will be with us through many informative and such good post....
this guy is a spammer. i had the same message on my blog.
U r right bro @zer0hedge is a very good writer.
the personal demeanor on censorship is obvious. According to some friends, I look at this subject very liberal. Is Olabilil.
But I think that the government will not be able to decide which webpage the people who are represented in the country where they live in the least mitigated state can represent and direct themselves and who are given the right to choose the Prime Minister. @zer0hedge
I also think that the government won't be able to decide that.
A very important topic I agree with what you wrote
upvote and resteem:) I support you